Welcome aboard

A new batch of House of Representatives legislators will be installed on Friday. They are the 550 House members who, together with the 128 members of the Regional Representatives Council (DPD), will make up the new People's Consultative Assembly. We would like to congratulate them and welcome them aboard.

Conspicuously absent from the new House are representatives of the military. The presence of their 38 unelected representatives in the outgoing legislature is now history.

Under the amended 1945 Constitution, the new Assembly will be less powerful than its predecessors. The outgoing Assembly summoned president Abdurrahman Wahid twice. The first time occurred in November 1999, only a month after he was elected, when he was asked to explain his decision to close the ministry of information and social services.

The second occasion took place in July 2000, when the president was asked to explain his decision to remove two ministers from his Cabinet. They were state minister for investment and state enterprises Laksamana Sukardi, and minister of industry and trade Jusuf Kalla. While he handled himself well in his first appearance before the House, Abdurrahman floundered in the second appearance.

Gone, therefore, is the 700-member Assembly whose immense power earned it a reputation for being the supreme state institution. The new House members, on whom the government has so far spent Rp 123 billion for their housing and office expenditures, will have more clout than their predecessors. This is because they were elected by an open split system, in which voters could either vote for them directly or for their parties.

In previous years, House members were elected through the proportional representation system, which gave party executives in Jakarta practically all the power to nominate their favored representatives, at the expense of grassroots representation. The true representatives of the people at present, however, are the DPD members, being the only ones who were elected directly by the people.

Some old faces will be returning to the new House, but most of the legislators are new, younger, better educated personalities who, hopefully, are more eager to serve their country and their constituents. Waiting on the sidelines is a new government with a new president and vice president, who are to be installed in 20 days' time. In the meantime, as political parties jockey for ministerial posts in the new Cabinet, House members are racing to elect their leaders.

Our thanks are due to the outgoing 550 members of the House of Representatives, who came on board at a tumultuous time in 1999, only a year after Soeharto stepped down. It is ironic, however, that one sign that outgoing House members are departing is the jump in the number of bills that have been endorsed in the last two weeks. These include the TNI bill, which was endorsed on Thursday, the final day of the House's term, the regional autonomy bill, the migrant workers protection bill, the social security bill, the domestic violence bill, and a pro-investor bill governing highways.

It is ironic because the House always had a backlog of draft bills that needed to be endorsed, and tended to stall in drafting laws -- a bit of deja vu recalling the 1997-1999 House, the last legacy of the fallen Soeharto regime, which also passed a number of bills in its final days in an apparent attempt to be remembered as an effective legislature.

While we cannot say that the outgoing House had the same motivation as the 1997-1999 legislature, the similarity is disturbing. No adequate public hearings were held for many of the bills prior to passing them into law in the last two weeks of its term.

During the Soeharto years, the House was often called a rubber stamp for its meekness. Following Soeharto's fall, the House managed to strengthen itself, due largely to the reform movement. But it soon earned itself a new nickname, the talking shop, for its lack of productivity in deliberating, passing and drafting new legislation.

Departing House Speaker Akbar Tandjung acknowledged last week that many of the laws yielded by the House, especially the 160 bills endorsed this year, were of questionable quality. Rumors of money politics in the House notwithstanding, two House members acknowledged on Tuesday that they had been offered cash to pass the mining and protected forest bill. Many observers believe that is merely the tip of the iceberg.

This is all cause for concern and should be taken into account by the new House members. It is for them to ensure that the new House of Representatives will be a true house of the people.